Small-Town Smart Alecks

By Francine Prose;

Published: June 20, 1993

NOBODY'S FOOL By Richard Russo. 549 pp. New York: Random House. $23.

YEARS ago, when I felt that the world weighed too heavily on my shoulders and believed (as only the young do) that the world would not willingly let me go, I used to dream of disappearing to some remote upstate New York town and checking in, a permanent guest, at its crumbling bleak hotel. Such towns, which I imagined to be off the edge of the map, are very much at the center of Richard Russo's fictional geography. His ambitious new novel, "Nobody's Fool," is set in North Bath, N.Y., a fractionally less blighted version of the blue-collar dead end where his earlier novels, "Mohawk" and "The Risk Pool," take place.

North Bath is the sort of community we might drive through without pausing, except to fantasize roomier lives for ourselves in its "aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont." But Mr. Russo encourages us to stop and look around; he shows us that what seems static is churning, underneath. And one soon realizes that no sensible person would go to North Bath to disappear, since life there, as Balzac wrote of the provinces, is lived entirely in public.

Perhaps that's the reason that small towns, like seagoing vessels, have always suited fiction: manageable little pressure cookers with a fixed cast of characters, whose lack of privacy and enforced proximity may cause the plot to boil over. What's turned up the heat in North Bath is the possibility that a theme park, to be called the Ultimate Escape, may be built there, and may breathe some economic life into the moribund former spa. Once a thriving resort, the town has declined steadily since 1868, "when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs, one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to dry up, and with them the town's wealth and future."

It's autumn 1984 and North Bath is "still waiting for its luck to change," but one senses its luck would need a fairly dramatic reversal to much affect the fortunes of Sully, Donald Sullivan, the novel's incorrigible and engaging hero: "Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully -- people still remarked -- was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application -- that at 60, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable -- all of which he stubbornly confused with independence."

Sixty years have knocked Sully from one part of North Bath to another, from his violent father's house to the rooms he rents now from the elderly Miss Beryl Peoples, his former teacher. A painful knee injury has him working odd jobs, off the books.

Sully is a partly domesticated, slightly maddened bear, feinting and jabbing at the center of the book's many subplots and hard-luck characters. His estranged lover, Ruth, has a husband she despises and a daughter whose own husband is trying to kill her. Sully's son, Peter, has serious marital troubles, two difficult children, a crazily possessive mother, a sick stepfather -- and he's been denied tenure at the small college where he teaches. Miss Beryl has been getting lost on her excursions around town, and she is compelled to fend off the grabby, selfish meddling of her banker son, Clive Jr. -- one of the main boosters of the Ultimate Escape. Even Sully's best friend, Rub (he's too dim to find trouble to get into), is undone by his wife's late-blooming kleptomania.

One wants to congratulate Mr. Russo for what he avoids. "Nobody's Fool" never slides into the corn-pone hokiness so often found in novels of small-town life, fiction in which the rural setting is either a Walker Evans photo or Dogpatch. In these books, the characters talk as if they were auditioning for the Henry Fonda part in "The Grapes of Wrath." But dialogue is what Mr. Russo does best, and the fun of this novel is in hearing these guys (and women) talk, giving one another a hard time -- they're funny, quick and inventive. (The novel's tone has the same low-key, smart-alecky intelligence as its characters.)

THESE people all have inner lives (you'd have to, in North Bath) and a range of expertise. They're capable of combining hard labor with metaphysical speculation: "Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look. . . . Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years -- that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it."

Like his characters, Mr. Russo deals with interesting themes (he'd have to, in all these pages): change and stasis, free will and obligation, luck, responsibility, forgiveness -- the bonds of community, friendship and family. He offers us apt observations of human types, human behavior. Here, for example, Sully's grandson reminds Sully of the boy's father: "Peter had been the same way, an almost comatose kid, it had seemed to Sully. If you didn't tell him to open a door, he'd just stand in front of it. At the time it had not occurred to Sully that the reason might be fear. The fear of doing the wrong thing. It seemed obvious now."

Having praised the novel, one has to say that it's not a consistent pleasure. Some characters are simply mistakes -- Peter's grad-student nympho girlfriend, for example. Near the ending, we feel Mr. Russo snipping and lining up the plot threads; we know where, and how neatly, the right knots will be tied. The Ultimate Escape park is built elsewhere because folks in North Bath are "funny-looking . . . like some failed genetic experiment." But, except for Clive Jr., no one minds very much. There's a sentimental pulling back from the exigencies of these lives as bittersweet music swells behind a warming vision of father-son reunion. A final grace note extends this beneficent spirit even to a semi-paralyzed Doberman pinscher, "its nub of a tail twitching in what -- who could know? -- just might be contentment."

More problematic is the novel's length. It's never exactly unreadable, and a lot does happen: punches are thrown, trucks and marriages wrecked, there's litigation, death. But at times it's maddening; you want to stick a pin in the novel and watch the subplots leak out. The observed asides and set pieces are among the best sections in the book, which requires a pace that's loose enough to accommodate the slow spots. Still, there's too much of a good thing -- too many mini-biographies of walk-on characters, too many points of view, too many idle hours at the OTB parlor and the diner. You wish Mr. Russo had been tougher in editing his book.

It makes the experience of reading "Nobody's Fool" a little like spending time in North Bath. Mostly you're curious and pleased, glad for a chance to eavesdrop and see into these lives, these souls. Then, after a while, you begin to fear that you'll never get out of this place alive. But as the end of your stay approaches, you feel a premature nostalgia -- you'll miss the town, especially Sully -- and you look around fondly, regretfully, as you speed up and drive on through.

Francine Prose's new collection of stories, "The Peaceable Kingdom," will be published in the fall.